First Church of Christ, Scientist, October, 1928.

The Braender apartment house, ca. 1910. The Braender, named for its German-born developer Philip Braender, is a ten-story apartment building designed by Frederick Browne and completed in 1903. Architecturally, the Braender incorporates a variety of influences into what the New York Times calls a “complicated, even chaotic mix of French Renaissance, Spanish and Baroque styles.”

Using Google Street View if you drop yourself into New York City, there is a very high chance that you will come across scaffolding over sidewalks. Also known as sidewalk sheds, these can be seen all over the five boroughs. Scaffolding has always been there across the entirety of New York City, but we don’t really know why and what is the purpose of scaffolding. Scaffolding in New York City is 400 miles long, which protects pedestrians from falling bricks and provides shelter when it rains. However, scaffolding destroys city landscapes and leads to other safety concerns, especially when walking at night. Some scaffolding covered the buildings over ten years, which also led to the fact that people never actually get a chance to see the entire design of the building. A misconception surrounding these sidewalk sheds is that they are up because of all the constant new developments in the city. The truth is far from this. To understand why almost every street in New York City looks like this we have to go back to 1979 when Grace Gold, a freshman at Barnard College in Columbia University was killed by a falling piece of masonry. The city responded to this by passing Local Law 10 in 1980 which was later amended by Local Law 11 in 1980 which required buildings over six stories tall to have their facades inspected every five years. If they fail inspection, the building owner is required to repair the facade, and in the meantime install a sidewalk shed to protect people from falling debris. The problem is, the law isn’t working as intended. Buildings fail inspection all the time and that is primarily because New York is chock full of buildings whose exterior masonry was done decades if not centuries ago. Repairing the facades of these buildings is very expensive. But here is what isn’t expensive, indefinitely leaving a sidewalk shed up. For most building owners it is cheaper to just leave the shed up, pay the occasional fine, and hope residents don't mind paying $3,000 a month to live in a building they’ve never seen. So that's exactly what they do. That's why a building like 409 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem has had its sidewalk shed up for over 15 years.

891 Amsterdam Avenue, 1937. The Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females (ARRAIF) was conceived in 1813. During the "Second Great Awakening," a time when the church aimed to reassert itself, mostly through charity, a group of women established a society to help elderly women who "once enjoyed a good degree of affluence, but now reduced to poverty due to the vicissitudes of Providence." The ARRAIF aimed to aid widows of both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. The first years of the society consisted of raising donations and giving clothing, furniture, and other household items to elderly women in need. In 1837, they established their first brick-and-mortar asylum at 226 East 20th Street with the help of John Jacob Astor and Peter G. Stuyvesant. In the late 1870s, the group purchased new land at 891 Amsterdam Avenue to construct a larger building. The building here was completed in 1883. Architect Richard Morris Hunt created a Victorian Gothic style structure. The new building was open to “any respectable non-Roman Catholic gentlewoman over sixty years of age, on payment of $150 and the surrender of any property she possessed." The building operated as the ARRAIF until about 1968. In 1990, it became a branch of Hostelling International and is currently the largest hostel in North America.

General Memorial Hospital, 1917. This still standing fortresslike French Renaissance building was constructed in 1887 as the New York Cancer Hospital, the first medical facility to focus solely on cancer. The planning and design of the building reflected prevailing ideas about illness, its causes, and treatment on that era. The hospital was funded by, among others, John Jacob Astor III, who wished to refute the stigma of cancer (in the Victorian period, cancer thought to be contagious and a disease of the poor or those with lacking hygiene). The patients were kept in the round towers, as it was believed that germs flourished in corners. The large windows in the circular towers allowed for more light, better ventilation, and a better view of the patients for the medical staff. Given the low survival rate of cancer patients in the early years of cancer research, the building became known as a death trap (with cancer advancement came an improved reputation). In the 1950s the building became a nursing home, but the operation shut down in 1974 with claims of patient abuse and crumbling facilities. The city designated the building a landmark in 1976, which saved it from demolition over the next few decades as plans were put forth for reuse, but none came to be. All the while the building continued to deteriorate and became a den for drug addicts during New York's roughest years. Finally, in 2001 a new owner began work on a residential tower on the west side of the lot. September 11th halted work, but in 2002 new loans and Columbia University's purchase of apartments in the new tower turned the tide. The tower was completed and the old hospital was restored and renovated into 17 luxury units. The roofs were fixed, the mortar repointed, and original windows were replicated.

Grace Methodist Episcopal Church, ca. 1905. The original Grace Methodist Episcopal Church was a small wood-frame chapel on West 104th Street, constructed in 1870. As the once sparse population of the neighborhood boomed around the turn of the century, the need for a larger space became apparent. In 1894 the cornerstone for a new church was dedicated. The resulting structure was a Lombardic-Romanesque building and one of the first churches in the city erected with an iron frame skeleton. Its most defining feature was the 156-foot tower at the southwest corner of the building. Unfortunately the church was destroyed in a 1983 fire. It was replaced in 1990 with a contemporary complex that includes a small church and an apartment building for clergy and low-income families.

450 Columbus Avenue, date unknown. Originally intended to be luxury apartments, the two buildings (connected on the Columbus Avenue front by a cornice) were completed in 1890 and 1891 as the Endicott Hotel . The hotel was quite opulent, with steam heat, electric lighting, and a glass-roofed restaurant. At the time of its opening, the Ninth Avenue El's 81st Street station ran just next to the hotel's third floor windows. A location for high society and political events, the hotel also had an unusually high rate of disasters and scandals, including assaults, murders, suicides, and plenty of mafia activity. By the middle of the 20th century the building was a cheap welfare hotel. As the city and neighborhood revitalized and gentrified in the 1980s, the once grand, then seedy hotel, was completely renovated and converted to condos.

New-York Cancer Hospital ARCHITECT: Charles C. Haight DATE: 1884-86 STYLE: Hospital Although the construction of the hospital was essentially finished in 1886, the opening was delayed a year because of difficulties in establishing proper sewer connections and the necessity of erecting two additional buildings; one a small mortuary building, no longer standing; the other, a boiler-house. laundry, and servant dormitory, still standing at 32 West I06th Street. When the New York Cancer Hospital opened, it was the first hospital in the United States and only the second in the world to be devoted exclusively to cancer patients (the other was the London Cancer Hospital). The death of President Ulysses S. Grant from cancer in 1885 was a factor which helped arouse public interest in the funding of the hospital. It was not until the 1880s that cancer was being seriously studied for the first time, and the New York Cancer Hospital was anxious to establish itself as a proper scientific institution. It promoted the use of surgical techniques for cancer treatment and the belief that this helped save lives. Many of the cancer patients were treated free of charge.

First Church of Christ, Scientist ARCHITECT: Carrère & Hastings DATE: 1899-1903 STYLE: Beaux-Arts The First Church of Christ, Scientist, built in 1899-1903 at the northwest of Central Park West and 96th Street was designed in the finest tradition of Beaux-Arts classicism. Although the architects of his church designed a few churches, the Christian Science building is very much in keeping with its designs for other public buildings.

First Church of Christ, Scientist, ca. 1990. The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was designed by Carrère & Hastings and built between 1899-1903. The firm’s imposing Beaux-Arts design fulfilled an intriguing commission: to create a grand ecclesiastical architecture for a relatively young religion. The design incorporates a large central auditorium, in addition to two upper stories of offices and areas for study. The building is notable for its large stained glass windows, especially those facing Central Park. In 2004, the church was sold to the California-based Crenshaw Christian Center. Ten years later, it was sold again, this time to a private developer. A planned adaptive redevelopment/condominium conversion project was later rejected, and in early 2018 the Children's Museum of Manhattan announced that it had acquired the building.